To be honest, I can see your point. The Nightwatch/Poke646/Vendetta textures are of so much higher resolution that they dwarf the vanilla textures. However, they were also so much more fun to play around with.

Yeah, I think I exaggerated the size of certain rooms especially the main hall in the final map (not a fan of that map at all to be honest). Big sized rooms are usually hard to detail let alone balancing the gameplay. More annoyingly enemies refuse to engage the player from a certain distance so you can easily snipe them from afar.

Half-Life 1 was certainly made for smaller scale rooms and corridors. If you make them too big the player can cheat the AI too easily.

I did tweak some of the more unfair battles (alien slaves spawning in your face) and added some more health. Perhaps you played this version? You can easily tell if you see the health charger in the last map near the key card -- the first version did not have this.

I did plan on adding an icky at that part but thought it was too similar to one area that I did in my "The Evasion" mod years ago so I never got around it.

You missed one secret in the first map near the elevator that leads to the sewers. Look for a vent in the ground. :)

If you've downloaded the older version but haven't played it yet I recommend downloading the new version instead as it fixes some of the unbalanced parts of the mod (replaced some monsters spawns with weaker ones as well as moving around some spawns and other minor stuff).

There will be crates but most of them will be unbreakable (only used for scenery). It will be pretty obvious which crates are breakable and those that are not (and if one is unsure just whack it once with the crowbar, if it produces a "clang" sound then it is unbreakable!)

Cool idea. Autonomy Lost will be released as stand-alone for now but I might actually merge the two later on. Should be pretty easy to do as well (would only need to add a level change to the final map in HTC and get rid of the credits).